We’re happy to announce that today, we are launching a month-long collaboration with our friends from Filmstro, “Music Month”. Music Month is a 3-part video series teaching you about the relationship between Music and Film. Filmstro is a brilliant piece of software that makes scoring for movies easy. We’ve used Filmstro on my rhino preservation documentary “Through the Thick” (watch here) earlier this year.
Watch the first episode below!!
Film Scoring Competition
Please head over to Filmstro.com for details on how to enter the competition. Using the Filmstro app, you will be able to score one of 5 pieces of sample footage. The submissions will be reviewed by a jury and the best submissions will win the following prizes:
RØDE Boompole Pro, SM4-R, NTG4+ and Newsshooter Kit
Zhiyun-Tech Crane-M Camera Stabiliser Gimbal
Zacuto $650 Gift voucher
10 FilmConvert licenses
4 x $250 bundles from Mister Horse
10 Filmstro For-Profit Licenses
All the details on the Filmstro page!
Music Month Episode 1 – Seeing Music
And now without further ado, please join Seb Jaeger from Filmstro and me for the first episode of “Music Month”. We sit and analyse the fundamental building blocks of music: momentum, depth and power. Using example scenes from famous movies such as Harry Potter, Transformers, Star Wars and many more, we dissect how these building blocks work and how they interact.
Join us and enjoy!
On next week’s episode, we will put into practise what we learned today, and score footage using these three musical elements.
Seb Jaeger from Filmstro with Nino Leitner from cinema5D talking about musical scores of movies during Episode 1, “Seeing Music”.

Looking for some licensable music? Struggling to find that perfect track and don’t have the budget for a custom score? Moodelizer may just be the app for you. With its Dynamic Playback function, you can fully customize a tracks intensity, variation, end & drop points to suit your edit.
Music selection can be a long and tiresome process in filmmaking; even when you find the perfect sounding track, it can be hard to line up the intensity builds, tempo, and end point of the music with your edit.
Having your soundtrack custom scored can be a great solution, but often an expensive and inefficient process. Moodelizer offers instant customization to your music selection; at the drag of a slider, you add intensity and variation, as well as timing drops and crescendos specifically to your current edit points.
Moodelizer is a monthly fee package that is a stand-alone piece of software. Add in your edited project, and use the theme selection bin to find a suitable sounding track.
The Dynamic Playback function will enable live mapping on your music track to match your edit. Alliteratively you can add in keyframes on the timeline and time stretch parts of your track to match your edit.
How well does it work? You can try it for yourself on the Moodelizer website.
This could be a great solution for certain project genres, many a time I’ve spent hours trying to blend multiple parts of a track together to meet significant edit points of my project.
Of course, software like this relies on a good track library. Pro access gives you around 100 tracks if the website is anything to go by, with a promise of regular updates in the future.
Moodelizer has a good selection of quick and easy to watch tutorials to get you set up.
Back in December, we posted an article on Filmstro that uses a similar automated technique.
It’s great to see new technology like this coming out; it’s time and cost saving tools like this that can prove invaluable to filmmakers, meaning creative efforts can be saved for other important aspects of your production.
Moodelizer offers a free trail and two subscription services, starting from $19 a month.

Christmas season is the time when most of us finally have the time to spend with loved ones and indulge in long-neglected hobbies like overeating or excessive movie watching. It also gives us the time to sit back, relax and to watch behind-the-scenes documentaries about movies and filmmakers we love.
The Weinstein Company has released a wonderful 40-minute conversation with two of my all-time favorite directors, Paul Thomas Anderson and Quentin Tarantino, recorded on Christmas Eve in Tarantino’s very own basement theater at his Los Angeles home.
Most of you know cinema5D as a very gear-centric website and we don’t spend a lot of (or enough) time talking about the content of films. Be that as it may, I found it liberating to watch the conversation between these world-renowned filmmakers geeking out on numerous classic films that were shot and/or projected on 70mm film, only to prove their point that is the superior format to digital and 35mm projection. Particularly Tarantino’s encyclopedic knowledge of films is staggering, but that comes at no surprise – his films are like minefields of references to an uncountable number of film genres and particular classical films. For cameramen/cinematographers who never had the chance to shoot in 70mm (that would be 99.99% of us) it’s also very educating to hear for what creative reasons in particular these filmmakers value the scope of the 70mm over anything else. (Christopher Nolan, Tarantino, JJ Abrams and other filmmakers managed to “save” the production of 35mm film stock just over a year ago.)
What is much more surprising than Tarantino’s knowledge though is the fact that he has succeeded in convincing a number of theater chains (like AMC) to bring back 70mm projectors to project his new film “The Hateful Eight” in this very format, which oftentimes meant necessary adaptations to the screening rooms that involved cutting additional holes in the projector walls in some cases.
In the second half of the conversation, they turn to the score of “The Hateful Eight”, which was composed by none other than Ennio Morricone, who hadn’t composed any Western score since the early seventies. It’s particularly noteworthy as this is the first time that Tarantino uses an original score in one of his movies. He recounts the day he visited Morricone in his Rome apartment to sit down with him discussing the film and music, which is particularly entertaining.
Happy holiday viewing!